The availability of affordable and reliable high-resolution and LED digital displays has resulted in an increase in digital outdoor advertising. Digital signs and billboards are quickly replacing their poster and vinyl counterparts along highways and in other public places. Digital displays are popular because they allow for flexibility in the method of delivering content to the sign and the number of different advertisements or other images that may be displayed on a particular sign during any given time period. For example, a digital billboard along the highway is capable of cycling through numerous advertisements on any given day and displaying time-sensitive content. Standard vinyl billboards, in contrast, can display only one image at a time until trained workers manually replace the vinyl advertisement with new content.
Because digital displays allow more complex scheduling options, they require different scheduling and delivery systems than traditional outdoor advertising. In the most basic systems, a “playlist” of advertisements or other content is created and loaded directly onto a computer or other device that outputs the content to a particular display. This system may be useful for controlling a handful of accessible displays, but it is not scalable to large networks of digital outdoor displays. In particular, it is burdensome for a user to generate and maintain playlists for each display and to load the content onto each device controlling the displays. Moreover, because this system relies on pre-programmed playlists, it is not possible to update the schedule or modify the content while the playlist is running without restarting the playlist.
Other systems for displaying content on outdoor digital displays are better suited for large networks of displays. For example, some systems operate as a network wherein the digital displays output content from attached computers that are in communication with a central server via a network or one computer outputs content to a series of daisy-chained displays. In some of these systems, a schedule for the networked displays is generated based on user preferences, and playlist style schedules and content are sent to each computer in the network from the central server to be shown on the displays. These systems may be used to generate schedules and deliver content to a large network of displays; however, they still have the disadvantage of playlist-style schedules. With playlist-style schedules, content and scheduling information cannot be easily updated without changing the entire playlist and restarting or otherwise resetting the playlist. Therefore, users are constrained to making modifications at scheduled times, if at all, rather than whenever it is convenient or commercially beneficial.
In another system described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/155,881 to Baluja, a schedule for displaying content on a network of displays may be generated based on certain criteria. The schedule may be rules-based in that it may specify particular times and numbers of advertisement messages to be displayed, as opposed to a playlist-based schedule. This allows a user to update the schedule at any time without disrupting the display of content. But the system described in Baluja does not give a user the opportunity to review the schedule generated by the system or to make modifications to the schedule. In many cases it is essential for a digital outdoor network administrator to have the opportunity to review the schedule and make modifications. For example, in order to sell available inventory, or time, on a display network, a salesperson needs to know which particular inventory is available for sale. Moreover, for various commercial reasons, it is often undesirable for certain advertisements or advertisers to be adjacent to each other in a schedule. With the system described in Baluja, users are unable to review the schedule and move slots around to ensure available inventory is being used to its maximum commercial impact and that the schedule meets industry separation codes.
What is needed is a system and a method for scheduling and displaying content on a network of digital displays that automatically generates a schedule based on user-defined criteria, gives the user the opportunity to review and modify the schedule, and allows the schedule and content to be updated at any time without disrupting the display of content.